


brave by reflection

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Category: Digimon Adventure Zero Two | Digimon Adventure 02
Genre: F/F, M/M, Non-romantic original character, Not Quite Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 17:59:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15418500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: Ken steps away, up toward an unoccupied machine, and presses his fingertips against the glass like a kid at the zoo.  Daisuke has to rock up onto his toes to see past him, but there’s no question about what’s snagged his attention so hard.  Right on top, pale green and adorably round, is a plush that looks kind of creepily like Leafmon.  Daisuke shoulders Ken aside, already shoving up his sleeves.“I got this,” he says, digging into his pocket for another five hundred yen.-----He don't got this





	brave by reflection

They have almost an hour to kill between trains. Daisuke is entirely to blame, but it’s not like it’s a big deal. There’s an arcade right there, the perfect place to waste time while waiting for the next one, so he drags Ken into the sensory overload of a moderately busy arcade, and they play frustratingly short fighting games, Daisuke dumping coin after coin into the machine -- loser pays for the next round, his own stupid rule. They’d miss another train, too, if it weren’t for Ken keeping an eye on the time, hauling him physically away from the machine when they really, absolutely have to go.

They have to pass through the crane machines on the way out, squeezing past mesmerized players. Ken is dead set on getting back home without having to call his mother to apologize for missing dinner, but he digs his heels in suddenly enough that Daisuke all but crashes into him, grabbing a fistful of his blazer to keep on his feet.

“The hell?”

Ken steps away, up toward an unoccupied machine, and presses his fingertips against the glass like a kid at the zoo. Daisuke has to rock up onto his toes to see past him, but there’s no question about what’s snagged his attention so hard. Right on top, pale green and adorably round, is a plush that looks kind of creepily like Leafmon. Daisuke shoulders Ken aside, already shoving up his sleeves.

“I got this,” he says, digging into his pocket for another five hundred yen.

Ken shakes his head, grabs his elbow, pulls him back on track. “It’s fine. The train, Daisuke.”

“Yeah but--” Daisuke taps the glass, fierce. “What’re the odds?”

“The train,” Ken insists, even as his eyes dart back to the plush.

Daisuke lets himself be tugged along, but not before he pulls his phone out to take a picture of it through the glass.

…

He goes back the very next day, armed with a few thousand yen and the determination to win that plush, no matter what it takes. It would be better if he had something to pair with that determination, like any skill at UFO catchers whatsoever, but Daisuke has yet to find a problem that he can’t brute force his way through if he wants it enough. He’s fought actual bad guys, okay? The kind that wanted to destroy the world. He’s not going to be brought low by a game.

Except that yes, he absolutely is. He dumps all his cash into the machine in less than twenty minutes and then tries just pressing his forehead against the glass and willing the plush to fall of it’s own volition into the slot. Which is going about as well as actually playing the game did, if he’s being honest.

In his periphery, the person at the next machine over yelps delight as she bags a doughnut-shaped cat. And that’s completely unfair. That shape is made for this kind of thing. He tilts his head to frown at her, blatantly envious of her crane prowess, and she gobsmacks him with a smirk aimed directly at his miserable person.

“You’re really terrible at this,” she says.

He scowls. Sighs. Thumps his head against the glass. “I know.”

“Whatcha want? Must be pretty good,” she says, snagging her prize and coming over to peer in. It’s just a jumble of plushes, nothing that looks familiar to him at all except for the Leafmon, which has moved a whole six inches for all his efforts.

“It’s for a friend,” he says.

She nods, wise. It’s the kind of look he’s used to seeing on Miyako, which is to say infuriating. But familiar, as is the tone of superiority with which she says: “Want me to show you how it’s done?”

“Definitely.”

…

Her name is Ayami, and she thinks Daisuke is just the right blend of cute and pathetic that she treats him to ramen after he blows all his money for the third time. The only thing they have in common is a love of noodles, as it turns out, but Daisuke has formed friendships over a lot less.

She wears green and only green, from her shoes to the clips in her hair. She listens to German industrial music, maybe ironically. He can’t get a grasp on her at all. But she thinks he’s funny, he thinks she’s kind of confounding, and they agree to meet up a few Saturdays in a row, after school, until he can win Leafmon.

And here’s the best thing about Ayami, hands down: she absolutely knows why he’s so determined to win the stupid plushie. He doesn’t tell her outright -- he’s not ashamed or anything. He’s had years to come to terms with this bigger than friendship, I-can-feel-your-heartbeat thing he’s got going with Ken. Calling it a crush is pretty dumb, but calling it love feels like miss too, what with having never said anything to him about it and not being sure Ken feels the same. He’s pretty sure, though. There was that thing a couple years ago, at Christmas, and then last summer, and when Ken spends the night now Jun gives them both really obvious looks about it, so. Pretty sure. But still.

Ayami thinks it’s adorable. Not in a weird, skeevy way. But she calls him a romantic, and stupid, and when he bombs out for the fifth day, they go get ice cream because, seriously, this is heading way past pathetic.

“It’s not that hard,” she says, eating a spoonful of just strawberry syrup and whipped cream. “You’re stressing yourself out. Hence all the failure. The horrible, horrible failure. Have you even tried to find one online? It’s probably worth all of a thousand yen.”

Daisuke digs his spoon down through a heap of ice cream and into a layer of hot fudge. Apparently they have a love of toppings in common too.

“I can’t. Not anymore. It’s not just the plush. It’s, like--”

“Your dignity? Don’t say it’s your dignity. That’s awful.”

“No,” he says, although, “well, I mean, it’s--”

“Daisuke!”

He has a solid five seconds to brace for impact before Miyako and Hikari are upon them, still in their school uniforms, bags in tow. Daisuke scoots over to make room before Miyako can force him over. Dignity, and all that.

“What’re you doing here?” she asks, leering and making an attempt at the wafer off the top of his dessert. He shoves the whole thing into his mouth because, again, dignity, and forfeits answering her question entirely.

“We were at the arcade,” Ayami says, introducing herself with all the ease he’s come to expect from her, but way fewer insults. She’s all smiles for them, even offers to get ice cream for them, although she’d refused to pay for Daisuke’s. In the way of Hikari and Miyako, they adore her immediately. Numbers are traded, phone cases are complemented, and a date is made for coffee, all of it in the span of less than an hour. So maybe he and Ayami also have the natural ease of making friends in common, too.

…

There’s a Chosen Children text group that’s been going strong for a couple years. Some days it blows up and Daisuke has to turn off notifications for hours at a time to avoid getting an alert every ten seconds, but most of the time it’s low key. The day after Miyako and Hikari jump him at the cafe, it’s neither quiet nor avoidable.

_Ayami-chan is soooo cute_ Miyako sends, along with a string of hearts.

Daisuke ignores it for all of two minutes. Miyako gets a crush on every pretty girl she meets. Fawning over one more is nothing particularly noteworthy. But then Hikari agrees, Takeru asks who Ayami is, and Miyako replies with the baffling: _Ask Daisuke_ with a winky face and ice cream and a frog, for some reason. That had better not be representative of him. He’s a dragon, at least.

_No one_ he types and almost sends before his brain manages to knock a thought together. Miyako will take that as invitation to start shit, for sure. But if he says she’s a friend, that sounds somehow even more avoidant. And that’s bullshit. She is a friend. But he can’t explain how he met her. Ken is too smart not to put two and two together and ruin the surprise.

As he tries and fails to come up with something that is exactly un-incriminating as this whole stupid situation requires, Miyako chimes in again.

\- _I invited her to the game she said YES_

Daisuke almost brains himself by dropping his phone on his face. He sits up fast enough to dislodge Chibimon, previously sleeping on his shoulder, and send the little guy sliding down into his lap with a thump.

_\- Ken’s game??_

_\- Yup!_

_\- You can’t INVITE PEOPLE TO OTHER POEPLS STUFF_ _WO ASKING INOUE_

_\- It’s a PUBLIC EVENT MOTOMIYA SO YES I CAN_

_It’s fine_ Ken replies, while Daisuke is still typing out and deleting a lot of unhelpful expletives. _I look forward to meeting her_

And, okay, if he stops for a moment and manages to be reasonable, there’s no reason why that isn’t a bad thing. Ayami isn’t his girlfriend, whatever Miyako thinks she’s doing, and furthermore Ayami is well aware of the fact that Daisuke has no interest in being more than friends with her. But that? That’s the problem. Ayami knows.

She has watched him dump way too much money into a UFO catcher, on multiple occasions, for something that caught Ken’s eye. She has listened to him bemoan his uselessness at said game and talk at considerable length about why he wants it. She knows he’s in really, really deep. And Daisuke likes her, but he sure as shit doesn’t trust her not to at least leer at Ken knowingly and tell Daisuke’s he’s got good taste. That is something she would absolutely do.

He opens up his conversation with her and types out a half-cocked warning but pauses before he hits send, the way he’s learned to through painful experience. He deletes the message, tries rewriting it with a bit less than bullheaded pride. He sets the phone screen-down on his knee. He tries to imagine the implications that Ayami will read into it. He grimaces, and sends it anyway.

_ \- Miyako thinks we’re dating. She gets really dumb about cute girls. Dont play along and dont do googoo eyes at ken. ITS OUR SECRET. _

…

Ayami texts him back at three in the morning, so that he doesn’t see it until his alarm goes off:

_\- aww you think i’m cute_

Daisuke sends the knife emoji and deletes the conversation.

…

Ken doesn’t have the dark spore, he isn’t breaking school records and getting perfect scores on exams, but he never needed any of that to be amazing. Daisuke likes him a hell of a lot more, anyway, and anyone who side-eyes Ken with recognition from those days can get bent. Ken without the genius is a billion times better, and not just because Daisuke actually gets the ball off him regularly during pick-up soccer games, although that helps.

Ken still likes most of the stuff he was so good at when he was the Kaiser. Math is his favorite subject, even if he doesn’t come easy as breathing anymore, and he’s on his school’s starting eleven, even if it isn’t the best high school in Tokyo. Sometimes liking the same stuff, still wanting to do the same things is worse. Sometimes it’s like being haunted by his own shadow, bigger than he’ll ever be in reality. It would be easier on him if suddenly he had become a whole other person. If without the spore it turned out that, actually, painting and baseball were what he was really into.

That’s not fair, at all, but that’s the way Ken felt about it for a while. How he probably still feels about it, a little, although it doesn’t weigh on him so much that he’s told Daisuke about it again, voice quiet and speaking more to his textbook, his collection of careful notes, the mediocre score on his English test.

Daisuke told him, tried to tell him, that all the things he liked were part of what made him Ken and that, you know, those were the things that made them friends. Not that Daisuke wouldn’t still be friends with him if he played baseball, or whatever, he would always be friends with Ken no matter what. It was just that, well. Daisuke liked him just how he was. And Daisuke had great taste, okay?

The whole thing was probably more of a diatribe than Ken had wanted just then, and pitched way too loud for the privacy of Ken’s bedroom. But Ken had smiled at him, finally, and insulted his shoes -- unfair! -- and there was no way that Ken had stopped feeling like he was trying to live up to himself, but he knew Daisuke was honest to a fault. He knew Daisuke meant it. Daisuke likes to think it helped.

Whether it did or not, Ken still likes his math classes and he still plays soccer.

He’s still good at soccer. Not national team material, unlike a certain someone, but good enough that he’s playing midfield for a school that’s played the final game in regionals for the past two years.

The game is in Minato, so the Chosen Children ride up together, train and then bus. They meet Ayami on the street by the field, impossible to miss in eye-aching lime green. She beams at Daisuke when he breaks away from the group to jog up to her, already scowling.

“Don’t try to be cute,” he says.

Ayami shrugs. “Don’t have to.”

“Come on,” Daisuke groans. “Promise you’re not gonna be a jerk.”

“Motomiya.” Ayami claps a hand on his shoulder, missing reassuring by a mile. “Trust me.”

Daisuke would rather take a punch than rely on that, there is no way in hell this is going to go anything like well, but before he can drag her away and force her onto a bus heading far, far away from here, the Chosen Children are upon them.

Miyako does the introductions, but she doesn’t call Ayami his girlfriend outright, so Daisuke will consider that a victory, however small. He’s going to need all he can take today.

Ayami is pleasant and cheerful, although she admits to having no knowledge of soccer whatsoever. Daisuke attempts to explain the rules, but Ayami waves him off and trudges up the stands after Hikari. Rude, undeniably, but no one is looking at them like they’re going to start holding hands and staring longingly into one another’s eyes, so win number two.

Loss one comes in the form of Miyako getting up and forcing him to switch seats so that he and Ayami are side by side. Daisuke fights it, he really does. Crosses his arms and tells her she’s going to have to move him, but Miyako has four inches and three years of judo on him. Miyako shoves him until he has to grab the bench to keep his feet on the floor.

Takeru laughs, Hikari scolds, Iori pretends not to know them, and Ayami rolls her eyes like the traitor she is and pulls at him until there’s less than a meter between them.

“Grow up,” she tells him. “I don’t have cooties.”

Miyako manages to be smug when she leans over him to talk to Ayami.

Daisuke doesn’t kick her, which is win number three.

They only have to kill twenty minutes before the game starts, fifteen of which Daisuke spends watching the teams warm up. Ken’s school wears green, not quite lime but close enough that, for a fraction of a second, Daisuke feels called out. If anyone notices, it’s only that Ayami dressed unerringly well. The chatter is enough to cover for the way Daisuke stares, unabashed, where Ken sits with his legs splayed, bent forward to grip at the gap between his studs.

Ayami leans into his shoulder to whisper, devious: “So much for dignity.”

…

The pacing isn’t great, so the passing’s not great, so the possession is all over the place but Ken’s team is quick to fall back and beef up the defense, which means that they don’t concede any goals, even if they aren’t rolling in chances of their own.

In the end it’s nil-nil, nothing more exciting than a shoddy tackle before the half that should have been a foul, and not only because it was on Ken. The teams shake hands, the players are gathered up for post-match discussion by the coaches, and Daisuke climbs down over the emptying benches just to get out from between Ayami and Miyako.

Ken waves from midfield and Daisuke can feel how dopey and obvious he looks when he waves back.

“Your forward sucks,” Daisuke says, when Ken jogs over, ostensibly doing his cool down.

Ken smiles and shakes his head and puts a hand on Daisuke’s shoulder, to steady himself as he stretches out his quads, right leg and then left.

“He’s a second year.”

“So’re you.”

Ken squeezes at him a little before letting go. His half step back is all the warning Daisuke gets before the other Chosen Children and Ayami come streaming up around them.

“Good game,” Iori says, in the weird stern tone he uses for his kendo opponents.

Miyako interrupts Ken only halfway through his knee-jerk formal thanks.

“This is Ayami,” she says, arm and arm with her, so that she gets to swing Ayami forward at Ken with a turn of her hips. “Daisuke’s new friend.”

Ken ducks a barely-there bow. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Ayami stares at him for a moment, head tilted slightly, just long enough that Daisuke can feel tension zip up his spine and settle between his shoulder blades like an ache.

“Uh,” he says.

Ayami smiles. “Daisuke said your eyes were purple.”

Ken breathes through his confusion, darting only the briefest glance away from her, toward Miyako and then Iori. “Well.”

“The hell,” Daisuke says. Yelps.

“You did,” Ayami protests. “You said he had purple--”

“I said violet!”

“They’re the same thing.”

“It’s a _shade_.”

“I thought they were blue,” Takeru says, and Daisuke gears up to inform him that he’s colorblind, but then Iori has the audacity to agree. Hikari explains that violet is a blue-ish hue of purple, because she’s an angel, and Ken excuses himself from the argument to rejoin his team as they clean up the pitch.

Ayami watches him go, hand on her hip.

“Don’t you dare,” Daisuke says, fierce and quiet as he can make himself.

Ayami scoffs. “Please.” 

On the walk back to the bus stop she insists, no matter what he threatens, that Ken’s eyes are nothing like violet.

…

This is the truth: Daisuke has been attached to Ken in a gut-deep, undeniable way since they were eleven years old, and it’s not just that they’re jogress partners. Miyako is his arch nemesis, but she doubles as his next best friend, and they talked about it once, after the shit had blown over, when everything had settled into a new normal.

Miyako and Hikari were closer after Silphymon, more open with each other, but Miyako didn’t feel it like a tug in her veins when Hikari walked into a room. Miyako didn’t lay awake at night with her palm over her heart, trying to pick up a phantom rhythm out of sync. Miyako hasn’t gone Christmas shopping with Hikari and waded into the crowd just as an excuse to take her hand.

So whatever this is that Daisuke feels for Ken, it isn’t because of Paildramon.

…

“So you’re basically married,” Ayami says. She is leaning against the UFO catcher, watching the crane lower, two arms brushing Leafmon’s face and then closing, limply, on nothing.

“We’re not married,” Daisuke says, digging more coins out of his pocket.

“Right. You’ve just been in love with him since you were kids.”

Daisuke isn’t looking at her. He refuses to look at her. He has three more rounds on this stupid machine and he is not going to let himself be distracted by -- whatever this is. An intervention, maybe.

“We’re not thirty. Don’t say that like we’re thirty.”

Ayami shrugs and waits until he’s failed again to say: “Yeah, if you were thirty maybe you could afford this habit.”

The sad thing is, Daisuke broke down on Monday and tried to find the plush online. He fu-ed the hell out of Google. Green plush. Green leaf plush. Leaf plush. Green leaf plush, again, just in case. It’s not like him to admit defeat, but short of begging the arcade owner to sell him the thing, he’s not sure what choice he has left.

“You’re lucky I’m such an amazing friend,” Ayami tells him, once he’s dumped his last coins into the machine. “Noodles?”

Daisuke’s sigh fogs up the glass. “Sure.”

She orders for them while he’s in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror and trying to keep his pep-talk internal. When he returns to the table, the waiter is already bringing over bowls of tonkotsu ramen. Ayami sets her phone down, charms clattering against the tabletop. She gives him a hard look as she cracks her chopsticks apart.

“You didn’t say you weren’t in love with him,” she says.

Daisuke shrugs. “Kinda pointless, right?”

“I’m going to do you a favor just this once,” she says.

Daisuke, with a mouthful of pork, can only stare at her for a long minute.

“You’re paying?”

Ayami rolls her eyes. “Not on your life, Motomiya.”

…

She texts him that night:

_\- you owe me ice cream x 2_

…

When he gets to the arcade on Thursday, Ayami is on the controls of the UFO catcher, face all scrunched up in concentration. When he gets close enough to see inside the machine, his stomach drops.

“You took Leafmon,” Daisuke says, pressing up against the glass and taking up so much room that Ayami curses and elbows him away.

“Shut up,” she complains. “I didn’t take it, you baby. Ichijouji did.”

He can’t feel when Ken’s in a room. They don’t have some kind of psychic link or whatever. But he can tell it’s Ken standing behind him, can see him in the reflection on the glass, so he’s mostly prepared to turn around and see him, in his school blazer, holding the Leafmon plush in his palms, the way he would the real thing, before he got big enough to do it one-handed.

“You could have told me,” Ken says.

Daisuke has swallowed a lot of things that he’s almost said to Ken, over the years. It takes more effort, almost, to let this one stay on his tongue. “You wanted it. When we saw it. And I really wanted you to have it.”

Ken rubs his thumbs over the fuzzy green fabric, smiling down at it in a way that Daisuke feels down to his toes.

“Thank you,” he says.

Daisuke rubs a hand through his hair, rough and bracing. “I didn’t get it for you.”

Ken gives a breath of a laugh. “Yeah,” he says, and offers the plush to Daisuke, still cupped in his palms. “I got it for you.”

Daisuke wraps a hand around Ken’s wrist, under the cuff of his uniform shirt, and squeezes tightly enough to feel his pulse beating there. He can’t tell, without checking, whether their hearts are going in time.


End file.
